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SUMMARY:‘We were film-minded’: Media-ting the London Blitz in the fict
 ion of William Sansom\, Henry Green and Patrick Hamilton - Beryl Pong (Mur
 ray Edwards)
DTSTART:20100519T163000Z
DTEND:20100519T180000Z
UID:TALK24548@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Christian Schlaepfer
DESCRIPTION:‘War supplies the artistic gratification of a sense of perce
 ption that has been changed by technology\,’ Walter Benjamin writes.  My
  paper will examine the matrix of inter-animating forces between art\, tec
 hnology\, and war though the use of cinematic perception in the fiction of
  three civilian writers who lived in London during the Blitz.\n\nOpening w
 ith an introduction to the socio-historical context of film in the 1930s a
 nd 1940s\, I will look at the increasing popularity of the filmic medium a
 nd the rise of the documentary form.  I will then consider the ways in whi
 ch it affected the literature of the day\, creating what recent scholarshi
 p has called a style of ‘cinematic writing.’  Finally\, I will trace t
 he turns that film-conscious writing took in the wartime fiction of Willia
 m Sansom\, Henry Green and Patrick Hamilton.  All three writers depict sel
 f-consciously media-ted subjects who see the London Blitz through the meta
 phor of a camera eye—the ‘cinema of the mind\,’ to quote from one of
  Sansom’s short stories.  \n\nWhat does it mean to experience and witnes
 s wartime through the lens of a camera?  What is achieved by comparing the
  seeing subject to a mechanical apparatus?  What does it mean to be litera
 lly ‘film-minded’?  Analyzing the writers’ divergent use of the film
  metaphor\, I consider how seeing like a camera is\, by turns\, an objecti
 fying defense mechanism\, a mode of experience grounded in propagandistic 
 clichés\, and a commentary on the use and abuse of film for political vio
 lence.  Ultimately\, I address the larger question of how literature might
  represent authentic experience in an age where the category of experience
  itself was under question\, both by the leveling pressures of war\, and b
 y the turbulent progress of media and technologies of perception.\n
LOCATION:Graduate Union Lounge\, 17 Mill Lane\, Cambridge
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